Hasta la victoria, quizás: Cuba’s broken economy

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1:07Sarah Birke:The Economist.

1:15Sarah Birke:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

1:30Sarah Birke:On certain corners of the wellness internet, you'll see all manner of claims made about peptides. Simply buy them and inject them, and you'll be stronger, better, faster with a glossier coat. We pick through the flimsy science behind a weird cottage industry. And did you know that Chuck Norris used to season his meat with pepper spray? Our obituaries editor looks back on a poor boy from Oklahoma who couldn't speak very well, who became a totem for all that is manly and the subject of endless goofy gags.

2:07But first...

2:15Sarah Birke:America's daring raid in January to nab Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela didn't just have big implications for that country. It was the last remaining patron of Cuba, a destination for lots of its oil. Since that lifeline was cut off, Cuba has been sputtering closer and closer to a full stop, which is exactly where hawks in the Trump administration, principally Secretary of State Marco Rubio, want it to be. They don't get subsidies anymore, so they're in a lot of trouble. And the people in charge, they don't know how to fix it. So they have to get new people in charge. Cuba's people have long deserved a better-run government and economy.

2:52Sarah Birke:Question is whether that's what they might get. Life in Cuba was already hard before the Americans intervened in Venezuela. The regime's economic ideology and American trade embargo have just devastated the island. And Trump's new pressure campaign has made things harder still. Sarah Burke is our bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. People are queuing hours to try to find fuel. There are shutters on empty state-run shops. And the monthly salary, which barely bought anything anyway, buys even less now. Cuba's economy right now is at Trump's mercy. And we have talked on the show quite a bit about how hard life has been in Cuba.

3:32Sarah Birke:Talk me through why and how things got worse. The Americans put on an effective oil blockade. So Cuba produces maybe around 40 % of oil that it needs itself. But the rest it got from Venezuela at a very steep discount, Mexico and Russia. And that all stopped when Trump threatened tariffs on any country that would supply the island with oil. And the consequences have just been this cascade of dramatic things. It makes it much harder to provide electricity. And then Canada and Russia, who send the most tourists to Cuba, have cancelled flights because there is no fuel for airlines to refuel when they're in Havana.

4:08So you see these glitzy hotels that are empty. Hospitals have cut some services. and much of the country sits in darkness at night. And when you talk to Cubans, and I was there a couple of weeks ago, they just say things are worse than the early 1990s when the last patron, then the Soviet Union, collapsed. And we should be clear that ordinary Cubans are suffering way more than the regime. And there have been some protests about the economic difficulties they're facing. But fears of reprisal keep many, many people quiet.

4:36Sarah Birke:But to your mind, is it easy to unpick the effects of America's latest intervention from mismanagement that came before it? No, I mean, there's a combination, right, and an accumulative effect. So the American embargo hasn't helped. But Cuba's government has to take a huge amount of the blame here. Cuba's economy has long been one of the world's weirdest and poorest. So it was originally totally centralised, this Soviet reliant system that has basically out of necessity had to evolve into a hybrid. So the Cubans have over time allowed more private employment, private businesses to start, but they still insist on keeping control of the overall planning of the economy.

5:10but that state-run economy basically doesn't work. There's a great example in that sugar exports fell by 90 % between 1990 and 2010 and the government still sets the prices and owns most firms, commands almost all the economic resources and misallocates them. So you see that exports have decreased over time and domestic debt is inflated away and it's a mess. And so part of the US strategy has just been to attack the remaining sources of dollars that Cuba has and one of those, a big one, is sending Cuban doctors abroad to other countries. So the US has put the end to that. It's also a cut of fuel and tourism is crippled.

5:45So the government really has no money now at all.

5:48Sarah Birke:So in a sense, what America seems to want to do is working. It's taken a largely broken system and just shattered it. Well, it depends what you're trying to do. But yes, the aim, I think, of the Americans is to put the Cuban government in such dire straits that they come to the table and give whatever Donald Trump decides he wants from Cuba. You can discuss whether the means will work and also whether they're justified. A lot of Cubans said to me, it's just really cruel. We're the ones who are suffering much more. But whatever view you take of that, it does seem to be working to some extent insofar as the Cubans have said that they are talking to the US.

6:22And the Cubans announced this week that it actually includes Raul Castro, who is Fidel Castro's brother and in theory has no formal position, but actually is the veto of everything that happens on the island still. And so what I think the Americans have said they seem to want, and they've gone a bit back and forth about this and it's a bit opaque, is to start with the economy. So get the restructuring of state enterprises, give more opportunities for American businesses, creating a credible monetary system, a long list of demands that there be a more free economy. So now we basically have to wait and see what these talks result in.

6:54The Cuban regime is not easy to change, and they've dealt with the US for a long time, and they think they can probably kick the can along the road, I suspect, and drag these out. But Donald Trump is obviously a whole different fish. So we'll have to see how that works. And whether, in fact, he wants anything that improves the life for the Cuban people or just gives a better deal to American firms who might be interested in Cuba. The Cubans have already ceded some ground. At least they've basically had to hand off the monopoly they had on importing oil because private businesses are now the ones who can do that for their own needs.

7:24And the other thing they said is that they're going to open up for Cuban exiles, mainly those in Miami who were an important part of Donald Trump's base so that they can invest in the country as well. We'll have to see whether that comes to pass.

7:36Sarah Birke:It's sort of hard to avoid the parallels with Iran with this notion of if you make things shaky enough, then the people will handle the regime change. Indeed. And I think at least several people think that was the aim of the Americans. But that's, as we see in Iran, probably not going to happen in Cuba either. Cubans have been locked up for coming out to the streets. And the other thing is a huge number of the young people who are the ones most likely to protest, have left the island over the past few years. And so what you have is a very old population, which makes it by dint of that demographic base less likely to protest.

8:09There's a different parallel that might be more instructive, which is Venezuela. So one of the things that seems to be taking shape in the American plan for Cuba is that the Castros don't necessarily go. This is something that Marco Rubio has built his career on, that he wanted to get rid of the Castro regime from Cuba. He's the son of Cuban immigrants to the United States. But now, if you see what's happening, it might be that they demand the president, who's not a Castro go, and actually leave the Castros and their relations intact on the island, including potentially putting one of their relations in charge.

8:41Sarah Birke:Quite apart from the question of whether a deal with America will make life a little bit better for Cubans, how will they feel about that in particular, the Castros take charge again? Well, again, it depends on which Cuban you talk to, but essentially Cubans were hoping that maybe out of all of this and the hardship and the pressure, they would get some form of change. And so if there's some form of economic liberalisation, that will definitely benefit them. But I think they'd also like to see the back of their regime. But what lots of people said when I was there is they don't want to see it in a way that causes chaos.

9:11They want there to be some negotiated transition, not some taking out of certain people that just leads to collapse. So there's still a bit of hope, but as this drags on and as they see what's happened in Venezuela and as they see what happens in Iran, I think that sense of hope is somewhat fading.

9:27Sarah Birke:Thanks very much for joining us, Sarah. Thanks, Jason.

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10:51Do you want bigger muscles? Would you like lush hair? Would you like a beautiful, glowing complexion? Well, you can have those now thanks to peptides. You can buy them in little vials from China, and you can inject them into yourself. The problem is that they are untested, unregulated. They may be contaminated, and there's no science behind them at all. So that's what we're here to talk about today.

11:17Sarah Birke:Now, Natasha Loader, our health editor, you and Tim Cross, our senior science writer, have been diving into this world of peptides. What drew you in? Well, they just seem to be everywhere. They're the newest generation of performance-enhancing drugs. And one of the things I was keen to do was see just how easy it is to get hold of them. So I picked a peptide. I picked one called BPC-157. What's that do for you? Well, it's one half of something called the Wolverine stack. And allegedly, if you take these two drugs together, it boosts your body's ability to recover from damage, just like the man with the claws in the spandex.

11:48Sarah Birke:Also probably does wonders for your nails, I would imagine. So simple as that. A couple of clicks and you own it. Yeah, it was like ordering a screwdriver off Amazon. There are dozens of these sites. Lots of them have reviews on sites like Trustpilot. They offer next day delivery. So I used The Economist's credit card. And two days later, I got sent this. For those people who are listening, it's a little vial of BPC-157. It's maybe an inch tall. It says, research only five milligrams and then you just pick a part of your anatomy and start injecting. At this point, I should ask the health editor, recommend that none of our listeners or viewers actually do this because this is not a safe thing to do.

12:24And the only reason, of course, that you can buy these online is because they're exploiting a loophole whereby they can sell them as research chemicals. It actually says on it, not for human consumption, research only. But the site I bought it from, they sell syringes, they sell the water, and they have these little tutorial videos showing you exactly how to do all this stuff. And it's all being normalized as well by really high profile figures like Joe Rogan, like RFK, Junior, the health secretary in America.

12:54Sarah Birke:So committed to getting to the bottom of this and gonzo journalist extraordinaire, you shot it up? I did not shoot it up. No, I'm with Natasha on this. It's really fascinating the extent to which at least some people are willing to buy untested chemicals on the internet and inject them into their own bodies. Biologically, a peptide essentially is just a word for a biological molecule that's too small to count as a full-on protein. Online, what it's come to mean is this whole constellation of drugs. There's like a peptide for all seasons. There are some which are meant to give you a sort of skin glow-up.

13:22There are some which boost your muscle power, allegedly. Some which are supposed to sharpen your brain. So it's become this entire scene. I mean, they're biologically active molecules, so they could definitely do something. And of course, GLP-1 drugs are peptides, and so is insulin. And quite a lot of this actually is people wanting cheap semiglutide. Yeah, exactly. But there's hundreds of these peptides now. And so it's not a simple question of do they work or don't they? Yeah, my guess would be there are hundreds. And so five or six will prove to be really useful. We just don't know which ones.

13:55Sarah Birke:So in a sense, though, same as it ever was, right? It's just out in the open now instead of dodgy characters in the gym. yeah what's fundamentally different is that the sort of performance enhancing drugs that have been used in the past at least these have been tested in humans what we don't know with any of these peptides is what kind of risks we're taking with our body and there is multiple levels of that there's a question of purity whether what you're getting is actually what it says on the label someone i spoke to in the course of this was explaining they'd had something tested and they had found a whole range of other things in this bottle, including a derivative of ecstasy and a weed killer.

14:35And then there's the question of, even if you do have this effective molecule BP157, which is stimulating blood vessel growth, it's like, well, is that a healthy thing to do, right? Is that going to trigger a cancer down the line? These are questions completely unanswered. I mean, for me, I think what's so different about it is the way, in the old days, if you wanted to buy steroids, you needed to know a guy who knew a guy at the gym. and now the internet lets you directly link the Chinese factories where most of these things are made with the resellers who supply the influencers online. If you wanted to look up what steroids do in the old days, you would have to ask your gym buddies.

15:11Now you have things like PubMed where every biological paper is just sat there on the internet for anyone to read. So there's this sort of weird mix of like plausible biological speculation that then shades into wishful thinking that then shades into sort of outright delusion. And people talk about this and they mix and match these drugs and say, I'm going to rejuvenate my mitochondria. It looks like science. But there are a whole series of phrases used for it. Bro science is one of them, this kind of...

15:36Sarah Birke:Boak pharmacology is the other one. Boak pharmacology was my favourite. And surely something ending in maxing. Absolutely. But it's all bullshit. And people can read into the scant literature what story they want to hear. Exactly. And the internet's allowed you to shortcut this whole regulatory process that exists for drugs to protect people from the potential downsides. What are regulators doing about this if it's clearly such a mess? I mean, there's a range of things that are going on. In America, they've gone the other way and they're saying we want a safe supply of some of these peptides, so we're going to allow compounding pharmacies to make them.

16:10Britain, other countries are cracking down on manufacturing sites, some of the online websites, but there's very little action on the social media channels. There is a giant marketing exercise. It's incredibly easy to make money selling these drugs. And so you have to just not take at face value anything that you read online about them. I think there's a broader point as well, which is that even if you could trust the people online, and I'm not saying you can, I think Natasha's completely right, there's a reason why we have clinical trials. It costs a billion dollars and takes 10 years to bring a drug to market.

16:47And the reason is fundamentally, we don't understand the human body well enough to look at a drug, predict what it will do and know all its side effects. And we've learned this the hard way. So they might be right that something plausibly has benefits. They might be right that it really has benefits, but they can't know how to balance those benefits against those drawbacks without going through the enormous expensive hassle of doing a proper clinical trial on these things. And there are hundreds, so it'll just never get done. I really understand this motivation to want to enhance or improve yourself.

17:17And medicine does stop at a point of saying, well, we've tested these molecules to allow us to judge whether they fix a condition that you have or cure a disease or whatever.

17:29Sarah Birke:Well, this is it. I think part of what this phenomenon reflects is the notion that the public at large thinks that medicine moves too slowly and it stops before it gets to the things that are important to me, such as a glowing complexion or whatever it is, and so that the unregulated market where there is a whisper of some science is a perfectly sensible place to go to get what the fullest expression of modern medicine will actually get for you. So yeah, and the people who put that point most forcefully are the Silicon Valley crowd. So their argument would be, no one's doing this science, the medical establishment is too slow and too cautious, we'll do it on ourselves and let you all know what the results are, and this will be good for humanity.

18:10But that doesn't tell you anything. It just tells you that one person who's had an intervention and they may have been doing half a dozen other things, you know, had a result. And if the problem is this deep and Silicon Valley is this concerned about it, then they need to find ways of at least advancing the knowledge of these peptides in ways that are helpful. There's lots of things you could do that would at least reduce the potential harm. And that's, I think, what we're both worried about.

18:36Sarah Birke:Tim, Natasha, thank you both very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.